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Filtering reports using tiles, slicers and filters

Power View provides three main ways to filter the data included in the
visualisations for any report, with scope as follows:

Method

Scope

Tiles

Tiles only control visualisations contained within them.

Slicers

Slicers control every visualisation on areport.

Filters

Filters control either a single visualisation or everything on a report, depending on
what you had selected when you created them.

Let's look at each of these in turn, starting with tiles.

Tiles

Tiles are - confusingly - the equivalent of pivot table slicers:

Here we're looking just at data for the
North quadrant, using a tile.

There are two ways to create tiles like this. The first is to start with a
visualisation the first column of which is the field you want to tile by:

Click on the
Tiles icon on the DESIGN tab
of the ribbon with a visualisation selected.

Power
View will take the first column of your visualisation, and turn it into the
field to tile by. You can achieve the same effect by using the fields
window on the right:

Drag the field that you want to tile by to the
TILE BY section of this panel.

Note that tiles have two looks (although Tile Flow looks
weird):

Tile Flow puts the tiles underneath the visualisation, not above it.

The best thing about tiles is that they can control multiple visualisations:

Here we're showing two separate tables for the
North quadrant.

Drag fields into a blank space in your tiles to create additional
visualisations controlled by them.

Finally, you can remove tiles in the same way as you remove fields:

Click on the drop arrow next to a field you're tiling by to stop doing so.

Slicers

Slicers in Power View aren't really like slicers in Excel (for one thing,
they don't look nearly as good):

Using a slicer to show only data for regions in the
North quadrant.

To create a slicer like this, tick a field to create a table based upon it:

Click on a blank part of your report, then click on the field you want to slice by (here
Quadrant). Power View will create a table showing all possible values for this field.

With this table selected, choose the Slicer option on the
DESIGN tab of the ribbon:

Click on this tool to convert your
table into a slicer.

You can now choose for which combination of quadrants you want to view data:

Here we're looking at all possible quadrants.

When you've had enough of your slicer (it may not take long!),
click in it and press Delete to
get rid of it (this seems to be almost the only way to remove a
slicer).

Is it just me, or are slicers unintuitive to use? Give me tiles over
slicers any day of the week ...

Filters for a report

The third way to filter data is to add a filter, which you can do either at
visualisation level or at report level:

If you add filters to the
VIEW tab, they'll affect everything on this report; if you add them to the
TABLE tab, they'll just affect the selected
table. Here we've set a filter for the whole view, so that we're
only showing data for factory outlets for both the table and the
chart.

You can filter by a field by dragging it onto the Filters
panel:

Drag a field from the field list to the filters section of the
view to filter by it.

Once you have a field to
filter by, you can choose from up to 3 different ways to set filters, all of
which are pretty self-explanatory:

Click on this tiny icon to change the filtering mode.

For the text field shown above, only two of the modes will show up - which is a
shame as the third one is the most fun to use:

For numeric fields, you can click and drag to change a range (here we're showing sales for shopping centres having between 49.506 and 94,802 square metres!).

Hopefully with slicers, tiles, view filters and filters specific to individual
tables or charts I've given you enough to work on to filter your data!

So far in this blog I've looked almost exclusively at tables; it's time now
to widen our horizons, and have a look at matrices, followed in close succession
by charts.